Friday, January 29, 2010

Guilty pleasures...

After several years of living in the hip & happenin' Virginia-Highlands neighborhood of Atlanta, my roommate got sick of the teeny one bedroom (I had my very own couch) and more or less unilaterally decided that we'd get a newer place a little farther out, so in early '00 we acquired a third roomie and a grand new 3BR apartment off Clairmont road.

By this time, I was back to working part time at the gun store and full time at Lawrenceville airport and between two jobs and a 100-mile round trip daily commute, I wasn't home much anyway.

I'd get home in the wee hours with the apartment to myself, nuke dinner, crack a pint of Bass Ale, and retire to my room to watch syndicated reruns of Law & Order over my supper before bed. Since I'd never seen it on network TeeWee, it was all new to me. I haven't really watched it since, and never watched any of the spinoffs.

Today I stopped at the local Video Game & DVD emporium on the way home from the grocery store, and they had seasons two through five for cheap. I picked them up with some leftover birthday cash, and that's my sad bit of nostalgia for the day...

I used to be a fan of the series, right up until Jack McCoy went off on a hysterical anti-gun rant right in the middle of a jury trial. At that point, various parts of the show's anti-rights stances became very difficult to ignore.

(The problem isn't so much that they show the police and prosecuters treating the 4th Amendment like it was a suggestion - it could be argued that this is one of the more realistic parts of the show - it's that they show it approvingly).

...one of my favorite Va-Hi memories was wandering the streets with my roommates the day after Hurricane Opal blew through in '95. The power was out for a couple days, so there wasn't much to do but go for long walks...

I haven't watched a lot of Law & Order, for whatever reason, figuring that I could watch them later. For the most part, I've enjoyed that the case doesn't end when the bad guy is caught, and they don't fiat the courtroom convictions.

It doesn't show the uniforms sitting, sitting, sitting outside a courtroom to testify, before being told to go home, but that probably wouldn't make very good TV.